Conventionally, disabling dangerous equipment has been controlled, if at all, by physical locks that can be attached to one or more disconnecting devices associated with the dangerous equipment. For example, a large press (e.g., 50 ton press) may require electricity and/or hydraulic fluid to operate. A repair technician will typically have a certain number of locks in his/her toolbox at all times. Such locks will have the repair technician's name or identifying mark on them. Alternatively, a repair technician may need to acquire such a lock from a central repository. When a repair technician, for example, wants to work on the large press (e.g., replace a fitting), the repair technician may employ one such physical lock from. The physical lock has only one key and the repair technician will hold that key. The repair technician will then manipulate a disconnecting device that is operable to disable the operation of the large press, and physically lock that disconnecting device in a physical position that maintains the large press in a disabled state. The physical locks may be distinct and personnel may know that the locks are safety devices and that they are not to remove such locks (e.g., with bolt cutters). Thus, the repair technician can perform the repairs on the large press secure in the knowledge that the press is inoperable. Thus, accidents are avoided.
But such conventional systems suffer from some drawbacks. By way of illustration, there may be a finite number of physical locks for a site. Thus, if the repair technician does not have enough locks in his/her own toolbox, and/or the central inventory of locks is reduced to zero by other technicians working on the site, the technician may not be able to perform a shutdown. Thus, necessary repairs may be delayed or the repair technician may attempt the repair without the dangerous equipment being disabled. By way of further illustration, in a large plant (e.g., 1 million square feet) the physical lock inventory may be located an undesirable distance (e.g., 1 mile) from the location where the device to be locked is located. Thus, there may be delays in acquiring a physical lock, and/or a person desiring to work on a piece of dangerous equipment may forego acquiring the lock, creating an unsafe condition. By way of still further illustration, to repair one piece of dangerous equipment (e.g., a stone crusher), may require other pieces of dangerous equipment to be disabled (e.g., a conveyor). Such other pieces of dangerous equipment may be located in separate physical locations, and such disabling may require the interaction of different personnel (e.g., electrician from electrical union, pipe fitter from pipe fitter union), which can create coordination, scheduling and control problems. By way of still further illustration, there are situations that require a large number of maintenance personnel to work on a single piece of equipment. In this case it become impractical to place many locks on many devices and ensure that the people working on the machine(s) know where each disconnection device and/or lock is located, which creates coordination issues, which can be exacerbated in plants with long lines.
Conventional physical lock systems, which may be associated with traditional paper based record keeping systems, may not promote accurate record-keeping, logging and scheduling. Thus, with conventional systems, opportunities for gathering data that could facilitate data analysis are missed. Thus, there remains a need for an improved system and method to disable dangerous equipment.